Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Your Newest Political Obligation: To Find Stephen Colbert Funny

I'm working on a slow connection, so I'm not going to link to anything, but if you've been slumming around the leftosphere lately you should have noticed that it's ideologically correct to:

(a) Think that Colbert is funny
(b) Think that he was particularlly funny at the Correspondents' Dinner
(c) Think that it's yet another strike against the MSM that they conspired to ignore Colbert's comic genius there

Apparently, anyone who denies any of (a)-(c) loves George W. Bush and wants to have 10,000 of his babies.

My God the left is rife with tedious morons. How do you guys stand this crap? Yes, yes, the right is worse. So what? That in no way means that the left isn't stupid and infuriating. I've often said that the one thing that could make me a conservative some day is the the left.

My reaction to Colbert, in case you're interested (and there's no reason you should be):

I think he's a little funny, but certainly no Jon Stewart. He's a one-trick pony, and the trick's only about a B+ trick to begin with. Now, funniness is a largely (though not entirely) subjective phenomenon, so I'm not universalizing these judgments. But anyway, I read that he killed at the Correspondents' Dinner, and I went to check out the clip. I was ready to be amused. But I didn't even watch the whole thing. It just drug on, I got bored, I navigated away. Not that funny, IMHO.

Then the purges and denunciations began. If you haven't seen Richard Cohen's op-ed on this, you should hunt it up. (I'll forge a link when I'm on a faster connection.) I think sane liberals often forget the danger that's posed by nutty lefties. Every time I try to discuss this, people get bent out of shape and harp on a fact that I'm always careful to acknowledge: the right is worse. And its kooks are in power, whereas our kooks are the fringe. But that doesn't mean that the kooks on our side aren't bad and dumb and dangerous. Even if you aren't anti-kook per se--and you should be--you should worry about our kooks because they are a major force in driving people over to the other side. (Evidence for this abounds, but a good anecdotal account of this can be found in the first few chapters of David Brock's Blinded By the Right.)

This Colbert squabble is minor and stupid...but it tells you something about the character--intellectual and otherwise--of folks like, say, Atrios. It doesn't show them to be thoroughly bad folks, of course, but it does show them to have at least some weird dogmatic tendencies. As Mark Kleiman has noted, Atrios has an inclination to treat people who disagree with him as if they were idiots. This is a tendency he shares with the likes of Limbaugh and Colter. Its a tendency that his commenters often share and encourage. And its the kind of attitude that can do real, long-term harm to individuals and countries.

Somehow this dispute has impinged on the dispute about civility in politics. Disturbingly, it seems to have become fashionable in some parts of the leftosphere to denounce and ridicule those who urge civility in public discourse. It's become a kind of standard joke in some circles. (As in: Lefty 1: "Smith's the kind of person who wants more civility." Lefties 2-n: "Har har har! Asshole.") The idea there seems to be that conservatives have won victories by being vicious, and Bush is bad, ergo we should be vicious, too. Now, I'm willing to listen to reasons in support of such an argument, but its weaknesses should be fairly evident. All I want to note right now is that we should beware of those who embrace such a weak argument with such unreflective relish.

17 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Honestly, Winston, who gives as shit?

1:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You certainly seem to have a tendency to treat people who disagree with you as idiots, as well. Perhaps this tendency is so strong that you don't realize that you're doing it, and you just think they are idiots.

2:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am also confused about your reaction to Mr. Cohen's column. His column, quite strongly worded, was that Colbert was rude, not funny and, anybody who thought he was is.. well, an idiot. So isn't Cohen just as bad as Atrios in this respect?

Although I don't seem to recall Atrios saying that anybody who didn't like Colbert's performance "loves George Bush and wants to have 10,000 of his babies."

2:38 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

You'd think instantaneous confirmation would make me happy, but...

*sigh*...

3:26 PM  
Blogger rilkefan said...

Woah, WS, people disagree with you, and you take that disagreement as proving you're right?

Cohen's column was remarkably lame - n+1 in a long series of remarkably lame columns - and he got called on it. Reasonably, by the people I read. Same for Cox.

Whether the performance was unfunny - as insisted on by people with an ax to grind, and some without - or funny - ditto - is irrelevant to the underlying issue of whether it was accurate criticism and whether it was newsworthy. The fact that it was also scathing on the MSM's coverage of Bush ought to have made it even more newsworthy - but as we know...

5:05 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'

'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'



Was Colbert funny? Wrong question. What matters is whether the party thought he was funny, and adjust your thinking accordingly.

5:55 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Why didn't I see it before???

Steven Colbert is the the funniest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life...

6:10 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

He gazed up at the enormous face. Four hours it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the nerdy eyeglasses. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Steven Colbert.

6:28 PM  
Blogger rilkefan said...

"What matters is whether the party thought he was funny, and adjust your thinking accordingly."

What matters is ignoring the actual issue by debating irrelevancies.

Colbert: "Bush sucks, and so does the press".
Press: "Bush has a double, ha ha."
Lblogs: "Colbert rules. Hey, what's with the press?"
Rblogs: "Colbert isn't funny."
Press: "I'm funny. Colbert isn't. He's so mean and rude."
Psuedo-lblog: "Colbert should have said that in the well of the senate."
Lblogs: "Wtf? He was funny as *(&)*@ - I was laughing. Anyway, why no press coverage? They covered Imus when he roasted Clinton, and they noted the double shtick, so why not mention Colbert and his content and Bush's reaction?"

etc., etc., ad infinitum

7:38 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Steven Colbert is the the funniest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life...

7:48 PM  
Blogger rilkefan said...

Winston Smith is always right. I am so embarrassed and contrite for ever disagreeing with him. I'll go kill myself now in partial atonement.

9:10 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Steven Colbert is the the funniest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life...

9:19 PM  
Blogger rilkefan said...

[in Hell, suffering the special torments reserved for those who don't accept WS's interpretation of events as law] AEEE##I&**J! A###@@##DDDWW$RRRRRGGGGG!

9:56 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

But...but...I have seen the light! I hereby publicly denounce my previous counter-revolutionary asethetic judgments.

Steven Colbert is the the funniest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life...

9:21 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I thought some of his lines genuinely WERE funny. E.g.: the one about rearranging deckchairs on the Hindenberg, the one about the press's role being to write down what the president does and to go home to write their novels about bravely standing up to authority (you know, fiction!).

9:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Was Colbert funny?

Eh. I thought so, but I've liked his schtick all along, whether he's talking politics or Dungeons & Dragons.

Debates over idealogical purity are tedious, and doubly so when they're tied in to issues of personal taste. "I love Braeburn Apples! Only Rethuglikkkans like Fuji!" Gimmie a break.

Now civility in politics? That's a little more interesting. Let's have a debate worth having.

9:47 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I didn't mean to say that there were no funny lines. The Hindenburg one was pretty good.

Part of why I don't think SC is that funny is that I don't like his delivery, actually.

12:17 PM  

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